Prof Akinyemi on Buhari, restructuring

IN an interview he granted the Sunday Punch last Sunday, former External Affairs minister, Bolaji Akinyemi, suggests that the buck to reorder the country stops squarely with President Muhammadu Buhari. Despite the excesses of separatist and self-determination organisations like the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), the former minister was not enamoured of the presidency’s handling of the grave national issues confronting the country. But he recognises that if anyone is to do anything to remedy the disarticulations within the country, that person has to be President Buhari whom the ordinary northerner trusts much more than any other person in that region, including ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar or even ex-head of state Ibrahim Babangida. He is, however, not sure the president will inspire the change sorely needed.

It is doubtful whether any student of history and/or political science will come to a different conclusion, even if they disagree with some of the premises of the professor’s argument. Hear Prof Akinyemi: “In a way, the presidency of any country is a critical agent for change…I hold the belief that President Buhari has a critical role to play in moving the nation forward in averting the oncoming tragedy and in heading the country away from collision to a cooperative destination in arriving at the kind of federalism that will be acceptable to all of us. He has a responsibility to do that. Apart from being the president, he (Buhari) probably right now, is the only Nigerian that can ensure that we don’t end up in a ditch; in spite of what he says at times, he is the only Nigerian. Not that he stands the chance; he is the only person. Whether he will do it or not, is a different kettle of fish.”

He continues: “…The present system that we have is skewed in favour of the North and the way forward will have to be the surrender of issues from the 1999 Constitution controlled by the Federal Government to the states.  Some issues on the exclusive list should be moved to the concurrent list and possibly, there should be a creation of the reserved list. So, it is the North that needs to make the concession. But if you’re going to be rational in your approach, the North has to be persuaded that it is not being asked to commit political or economic suicide and the only person right now that the North truly trusts and believes will not play politics with their interests is Muhammadu Buhari. He stands now in the kind of position that the (late) Sardauna stood in the sixties. An average person on the northern streets believes in Buhari in the way that they don’t believe in (former Vice President) Atiku (Abubakar) or my former boss, IBB, because those are the people who have spoken out forcefully calling for restructuring…”

Rounding up his argument, Prof. Akinyemi concludes: “But Buhari stands in that position of trust in the estimation of the northern streets that ‘if he should say that we need to give up these issues, he’s not selling us.’ What we need to do is to find people in the North that Buhari trusts  people who can discuss with him, that he believes are not setting a trap for him. The Yoruba leaders’ meeting in Ibadan and this interview will not get through to Buhari. But there are people in the North who can speak with him. There must be mutual trust between Buhari and those speaking with him.”

The former External Affairs minister offers many other arguments on restructuring, self-determination organisations, the Yoruba regional agenda, and the need for everyone to recognise that the present structure is simply not tenable and must be reworked for the country to take a great leap forward. He cites the examples of countries that have broken up and warns that nothing is inevitable. Though overall he is sceptical about the right things being done, he manages to sustain his optimism about today’s leaders appreciating their place in Nigeria’s historical conjuncture and doing everything to avoid the tragic consequences of war or disintegration.

Indeed the lessons of history, which Nigerian leaders are tragically chary of studying, or are even completely inured to, do not lead anyone, least of all this writer, to say conclusively that the ongoing engagements in Nigeria would end optimistically. But as Prof Akinyemi suggested in the interview, President Buhari, despite his well-known aversion for broadmindedness, must be nudged into recognising the nature of the crises afflicting the country, crises that speak deeper and apocalyptic messages than many people, including the president and his aides, have apparently grasped. It is one of the enduring tragedies of Nigeria that its leaders know little of the histories of the people of Nigeria, not to talk of understanding the dynamics of their (histories) interconnectedness. Without an understanding of these complex histories and the dynamics of the people’s cultural and religious interconnectedness, not only will it be difficult for that leader to intuitively grasp what must be done at any juncture, he will even more likely also be unable to appreciate the critical responsibility history has thrust upon him as a person and leader.

Prof Akinyemi diplomatically retained a delicately optimistic outlook of the Buhari presidency’s competence in mediating and moderating the changes needed to guarantee national peace and stability. This column is not so generous for a number of reasons. Take the IPOB crisis for example. The crisis was completely avoidable, and it ought to have been foreseen and denied the oxygen that fuelled it. For in dealing with the matter as the Buhari presidency has done, the chances and cost of creating dangerous aftershocks for the future are prohibitive and impossible to quantify. Despite the bastardisation of the Igbo cause by neophyte agitators and the absence of a consensus for secession, it is indisputable that the factors that gave fillip to the agitations are very well known. The factors predate the emergence of IPOB, leading to the formation of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) in 1999. Those factors were, however, aggravated by the Buhari presidency through a series of alienating policies that stoked feelings of disenchantment and animosity in the region. In addition, the presidency then proceeded rather disingenuously to frame the narrative in a manner that portrayed the problem as the agitations themselves, especially the excesses and idiosyncrasies of IPOB leaders, rather than the stifling factors that spurred the agitations.

It is impossible to determine whether the pacification of the Southeast will bring about the peace and stability most Nigerians desire. It is clear that every time members of two ethnic groups engage in a brawl, there will always be the danger of spillover to other parts of the country, a reminder that leaders have left many things undone. The Igbo themselves have frequently and more than any other ethnic group been at the receiving end of reprisal attacks in other parts of the country, sometimes over matters they know nothing about. That the Buhari presidency painted the apocalyptic picture of civil war as a consequence of the self-determination agitations in the Southeast, complete with broadcasting vignettes of the 1967-70 civil war, was nothing but a deplorable, albeit successful attempt to shape the narrative to avoid coming to grips with the real and substantial issues of the national question. Only the careful observer will appreciate that the fanciful and hollow ritual embarked upon by IPOB, which the government has framed as terrorism and warmongering, has actually led to far fewer fatalities than the groups which presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, last week described as mere ‘criminal gangs’, and than the Igbo have suffered in their many decades of victimhood after the civil war.

It is obvious that the Buhari presidency needed to come up with a disingenuous narrative to justify its prior but constricted understanding of the dynamics of separatist or self-determination movements. Having portrayed the recent agitations in the Southeast as terrorism and its proponents as exponents of war to widespread approval, the government, military and other sectional leaders congratulated themselves as having by patience, hard work and deliberate interventions averted war. They are entitled to their self-congratulations. This column is, however, not taken in. Not only are the narratives horrifyingly and disconcertingly misplaced, including suggesting that the Igbo as a people, not IPOB, had virtually embraced secession, they also set the tone for the president’s implacability and misconceived and misdirected intervention on a scale that beggars belief and outweighs interventions in other far more threatening crises.

More embarrassingly, the Buhari presidency gave the impression that only one type of intervention — a military crackdown — in the Southeast could curb the disturbances in that region. To proponents of force as a tool for pacification, this approach is logical and sensible. But in reality it is hardly defensible, as this column has consistently maintained. What the situation called for, assuming the president properly understood the factors engendering the crisis, was his direct and personal intervention in the region. He should have travelled to the region, speak with their leaders, both traditional and political, hear from them directly, come to some sort of agreement on what should be done, schedule other meetings with the so-called troublemakers, let them appreciate his genuineness and love for the people of the Southeast, and allay their fears. As a democrat, not the monarch many presumed him to be, he should have rounded off what would perhaps have been a two-day visit with a stirring, philosophical speech on unity, stability, development and constitution-making.

Instead, after bewitching his own supporters and getting the approval of those who sanction the application of force in such matters, he spoke gruffly to the region, threatened them with fire and brimstone, and then brought down the sledgehammer. His initial success will convince him and his supporters that they have taken the right steps. It is doubtful. The problem has only been driven underground. If the factors that drove a small part of the Igbo population to reluctantly connive at the IPOB propaganda are not dealt with expeditiously, the volcano will explode sometime in the future. The IPOB leader, the imperious and impetuous Nnamdi Kanu, was never a true leader, not to say a sagacious one. Nigeria is lucky that such a megalomaniac led the IPOB cause. Had the country contended with a far more restrained, intelligent and emollient character who would not show his hands early nor deal his cards openly, the country would find it more difficult to contain him regardless of the commercial predilections of the Igbo.

It does grave injury to the rest of the country and the presidency to describe the crude and self-centred IPOB campaigns as coterminous with the Igbo agenda. Such an unhelpful analysis and generalisation, including the fraudulently shaped narratives encapsulated in the hysteria of war, will do nothing but push the seething disaffection in the region underground. The country needs a leader who can see through the fog into the future, a leader who has been to the mountaintop and sees the promised land, someone with the right instincts and perspectives, someone who understands clearly the futility of seeking advantage for his ethnic group today only to lose those advantages when another ethnic group takes power tomorrow, someone who is fanatical about doing justice and promoting equity. Prof Akinyemi was right to suggest that neither Alhaji Atiku, despite his urbaneness and accommodation, nor Gen Babangida, regardless of his false geniality, could approximate those yearnings, nor be trusted enough by everyone, especially the North, to superintend the desired restructuring. But he was too kind to hope that President Buhari, the even more conservative apostle of ad hocism, can still be that change agent — a persona decades of anvil could not forge out of him, a persona he seems more than ever now loth to assume.

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